At the start of the tour
Welcome to Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway
Welcome to Lassen Volcanic National Park. This tour follows the park highway for about thirty miles, from here near the Southwest Entrance to Manzanita Lake in the park's northwest corner, in the same order the park numbers its roadside markers. There are ten stops along the way.
Every rock in this park came from a volcano, and all four kinds of volcano found in the world are here: shield, composite, cinder cone and plug dome. The ground isn't finished, either. Steam vents, boiling springs and bubbling mudpots show that the volcanic center still smolders. In the park's own words, no one can say when or where the next eruption will happen. Only that it will.
Lassen Peak's last eruptions came between 1914 and 1917. They were the last in the Cascade Range until Mount St. Helens in 1980, and they helped make this a national park in 1916.
People knew this mountain long before any of that. The Lassen area was a meeting point for at least four peoples, the Atsugewi, the Yana, the Yahi and the Maidu, who came up in the warmer months to hunt and gather. You'll hear some of their history along the way.
Here's how this works. I'll tell you a story on the way to each stop, and another when you get there. In between, I'll leave you to the forest and the views.
Point 1 · At the stop
Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center
This is the Kohm Yah-mah-nee Visitor Center. The name means Snow Mountain in Mountain Maidu, and it's a name for Lassen Peak. When this building opened in 2008, it became the first park facility to receive a Tribal name.
Snow is the story of this hillside. For decades it was a ski area. Ski competitions here began in 1932, and after the 1960 Winter Olympics were held not far away in California, skiers came to the park in record numbers. A two-story A-frame chalet with a tall glass wall went up on this site, and later a chairlift named Bumpass Heaven. Poor snow years and newer resorts nearby took their toll, and the ski area's last season was 1994. The chalet was torn down in 2005.
The visitor center replaced it, built partly with materials from the old chalet. It's lit by daylight and cooled with groundwater. Inside are an information desk, exhibits, a bookstore and food. Outside, people still look up at the slopes trying to trace the old ski runs. Restoration work has returned the hillside to its natural state, and the more than fifty concrete lift foundations are gone.
In winter, the park highway closes just beyond here, and this becomes a base camp for sledding, snowshoeing and skiing. It's fitting that the tour starts under the mountain's oldest name.
History, on the way there
On the way: Sulphur Works
Next, we're heading to Sulphur Works, the easiest of the park's hydrothermal areas to reach.
Its old-fashioned spelling comes with a story. In the middle of the eighteen hundreds, an Austrian immigrant named Mathias Supan dug minerals out of this ground and refined sulfur and other elements into all kinds of products. He called the place his paint mine. The name that stuck, Sulphur Works, keeps the British spelling of the word.
Around the time the national park was being created, his descendants filed a land claim here and turned the place into a roadside attraction. The family and the park both saw promise in this steaming ground, and there was tension between them for years. In the end, the park bought the land, in 1952.
Point 2 · At the stop
Sulphur Works
This is Sulphur Works. Smell that, like rotten eggs? It's hydrogen sulfide gas, the smell of an active volcanic center. About six miles below you, hot rock heats water far past its boiling point. It rises through the cracks as steam and escapes here, in hissing vents and bubbling mudpots.
The peaks around this wide basin are the broken remains of a much older volcano, and this steaming ground sits about where its central vent used to be.
The ground here changes fast. In the early nineteen eighties, a patch of steaming ground in upper Sulphur Works collapsed and became a huge boiling mudpot. And the crust can be thin. In 2012, a visitor who stepped off the sidewalk broke through a crust about an inch thick into boiling, acidic water and mud. So the sidewalk is the place to watch from.
Some life loves it here anyway. Microbes called extremophiles thrive in these hot, acidic pools, and scientists study them as clues to the earliest life on Earth, and to life that might exist on Mars.
It's an odd place to stand: the last rumblings of a volcano that died long ago, on ground that is remade every single day.
History, on the way there
On the way: Bumpass Hell trailhead and Brokeoff vista
Next, we're heading to a trailhead high on the flank of a volcano that is mostly gone.
About six hundred thousand years ago, a great volcano began to grow here. Geologists call it Brokeoff Volcano, or Mount Tehama. At its biggest it was about eleven miles wide and some eleven thousand five hundred feet tall, roughly a thousand feet taller than Lassen Peak is today. After its eruptions ended, acidic water from its own hot springs, and the ice of glaciers, slowly ate it away. The ring of peaks around this part of the park, including Brokeoff Mountain and Diamond Peak, is what's left.
Diamond Peak, by the way, has no diamonds. It's named for quartz crystals found in cavities in its lava. It's still standing because that lava is harder than the rock around it, and its cliffs now make good perches for golden eagles.
The trail from the trailhead leads to a steaming basin named for a pioneer who learned about it the hard way. Kendall Vanhook Bumpass held a mining claim in the Lassen area, and in 1865 he broke through the crust in that basin and badly injured his leg. The basin has carried his name ever since. It's the park's largest hydrothermal area, about sixteen acres of mudpots, roaring steam vents and colorful pools, and the hottest. Its biggest vent, Big Boiler, has jetted steam measured at three hundred twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit, one of the hottest vents of its kind in the world.
Point 3 · At the stop
Bumpass Hell trailhead and Brokeoff vista
This is the trailhead, at a viewpoint the park calls the Brokeoff Volcano vista. Look around at what the ice did here. Glaciers carved and scoured this whole area thousands of years ago. The jagged peaks above, the polished slabs of rock, and the U-shaped valley below all carry their marks.
At the end of the parking area sits a lone boulder. It's a glacial erratic: the ice carried it here, then melted away around it and left it behind.
From here, the trail to the hydrothermal basin is about three miles round trip, open in summer and fall, with boardwalks through the steaming ground. Stay on them. Ground that looks solid there can be a thin crust over boiling, acidic water.
And listen among the rocks for a high-pitched squeak. That's the pika, a small, guinea-pig-sized relative of the rabbit that needs cool, rocky slopes like these. Rising temperatures may push it to look for cooler ground, a small reminder that ice, steam and people all change this place.
Point 4 · At the stop
Lake Helen
This is Lake Helen, lying below Lassen Peak. Before it carried Helen's name, it was called Sapphire Lake, and it's easy to see why. The lake is about a hundred and ten feet deep and exceptionally clear. Deep, clear water absorbs red light and scatters the blue, so the deeper the water, the bluer it looks.
This is also one of the snowiest places in California. Scientists began measuring the snow here in 1930 and found it one of the wettest survey sites in the state. In 1995, surveyors measured a drift forty feet deep. In winter the whole lake disappears under snow, and every year, on April first, the site is measured to help water managers predict how much water the coming months will bring.
Climbers on the summit trail judge their progress by how small this blue gem looks below them. And the snow that melts out of this basin all summer ends up as water for farms and towns far below. A peach in the valley may owe something to this lake.
History, on the way there
On the way: Lassen Peak trailhead
Next, we're heading to the Lassen Peak trailhead, the highest point on the park highway.
You've already heard one of the mountain's older names, Snow Mountain. The name on the map honors Peter Lassen, a Danish pioneer who guided settlers through this country and established a route for emigrants heading to the Sacramento Valley.
Geologists tell its story in thousands of years. Lassen Peak formed about twenty-seven thousand years ago, probably within just a few years, as lava too thick to flow piled up into a steep dome. Then the glaciers went to work. Between about twenty-five thousand and eighteen thousand years ago, one of them carved out the bowl on the mountain's northeast side and reached about seven miles out from the peak. Today only one tiny remnant of a glacier survives, in a hollow on its eastern flank.
Point 5 · At the stop
Lassen Peak trailhead
This is the Lassen Peak trailhead, at about eighty-five hundred feet, the top of the park highway. The summit is still about two thousand feet above you, at ten thousand four hundred fifty-seven feet. Lassen Peak is one of the largest lava domes on Earth.
Look on the mountain for a dark knob of hardened lava. The park calls it Vulcan's Eye.
The summit trail is about five miles round trip, with about two thousand feet of climbing. At the top are the craters from the last eruptions. The larger one was blasted out on May twenty-second, 1915, and the northern one by steam explosions in May 1917. The highway and the summit trail were both finished in 1931, opening the mountain to new generations of climbers, and their boots wore the slopes down. In 2015, the park finished a five-year project rebuilding the trail.
Steam still rose from those summit craters into the nineteen fifties. Today the mountain is quiet, but it's the same mountain that blew open its own summit a little over a century ago.
History, on the way there
On the way: Kings Creek
Next, we're heading to Kings Creek, about halfway along the park highway.
The park is older than its road. In 1905, this country became national forest. In 1907, Lassen Peak was made a national monument, and so was Cinder Cone, a younger volcano in the park's northeast corner. Then Lassen Peak erupted, and Benjamin Loomis's photographs of the eruptions brought it national attention and helped the campaign for a national park. On August ninth, 1916, Congress created Lassen Volcanic National Park, one of the oldest national parks in the country.
The road took longer. The park highway was finished in 1931, and park officials organized a gathering to dedicate the park and celebrate the new road. To mark the day, the director of the National Park Service, Horace Albright, reluctantly agreed to fireworks on the summit to imitate an eruption. The plan stirred up both controversy and excitement. The crowd watched from Kings Creek Meadow. Then the wind blew the smoke the wrong way, and the big show was a grand fizzle.
The road itself is now part of the story. The Lassen Volcanic National Park Highway is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.
Point 6 · At the stop
Kings Creek
This is Kings Creek, in the meadow country on the east side of Lassen Peak.
From the picnic area, a short trail leads to Cold Boiling Lake, a quiet little lake where gas bubbles rise through cold water like soda.
Open meadows like these are also some of the best seats in the park for the night sky. Lassen is far from city lights. On a moonless night you can see the Milky Way arching overhead, and when the moon is full, it lights up the meadow with an eerie glow. The park has celebrated that darkness with a dark sky festival.
In 1931, people came to this meadow to watch a man-made eruption that never quite happened. The real show was always overhead, and it doesn't need any gunpowder.
History, on the way there
On the way: Hat Lake
Next, we're heading to Hat Lake, on Hat Creek.
This creek was an important thread in the lives of the Atsugewi. They spent their winters along Hat Creek and in Hat Creek Valley, and in spring and summer they moved up into what is now the north side of the park, along Hat Creek and Lost Creek. The creek was a rich fishing ground, and they caught fish with baskets, nets and dams. One band was known as the pine-tree people, because their homes and hunting grounds lay mostly in the pine forests.
In the early nineteen hundreds, a settler named Joseph Rossi built a flume in this area, using water from Hat and Lost Creeks to run a small powerhouse. A few years later, the eruption of Lassen Peak sent a massive mudflow down the valley. It wiped out much of the flume and put an end to the venture.
That same mudflow dammed Hat Creek, and that is how Hat Lake was made.
Point 7 · At the stop
Hat Lake
This is Hat Lake, and you may be wondering where the lake is.
After the mudflow made it, aspens and other plants slowly came back to the bare ground. The new pond made an ideal home for beavers, and their dams helped keep it full. Then, for reasons nobody knows, the beavers left. Without their dams, the pond drained, and what was a lake turned back into meadow.
A rushing creek, then a lake made by a volcano, then a beaver pond, then a meadow, all in the span of a century. The park keeps updating its maps to keep up. Who knows what this spot will be in another hundred years.
History, on the way there
On the way: Devastated Area
Next, we're heading to the Devastated Area.
In mid-May 1915, the eruption changed character. Glowing blocks of lava were seen bouncing down the peak, and by the next morning a dome of new lava had filled the summit crater. Late on the night of May nineteenth, an explosion shattered that dome. Hot blocks fell onto snow more than thirty feet deep and set off an avalanche of rock and snow half a mile wide that roared four miles down the mountain.
As the snow melted, the avalanche turned into a huge mudflow, called a lahar. It ran down Lost Creek and flooded the lower Hat Creek valley in the early morning hours. Ranch houses near Old Station were damaged, but the few people in them escaped with only minor injuries.
Point 8 · At the stop
Devastated Area
This is the Devastated Area. Your first thought might be: what's so devastated about it? In the century since the eruption, the forest has grown back.
On the morning of May twenty-second, 1915, Benjamin Loomis and a group of friends came to see what the mudflow had done. He photographed a rock that was still hot to the touch, and labeled it hot rock. Then he ran out of film, and left. That afternoon, at about four o'clock, Lassen Peak exploded in its most powerful eruption. A column of ash and gas rose more than thirty thousand feet, and part of it collapsed and swept down this side of the mountain as a pyroclastic flow, a racing avalanche of hot ash, pumice and gas. It devastated about three square miles. Trees still standing were snapped off and blown down, pointing away from the peak. Fine ash fell as far away as Elko, Nevada, two hundred eighty miles to the east.
Look at the grey, sandy ground around the parking area. That's pumice that rained down that day. The short interpretive loop here passes huge blocks of dacite lava, including the rock in the Loomis photograph. Please leave every stone where it lies, so others can read the story too.
For about fifty years, this slope stayed nearly bare while seedlings struggled. The young forest around you is the mountain's slow answer to one afternoon in 1915.
History, on the way there
On the way: Chaos Crags and Jumbles
Next, we're heading to Chaos Crags, a cluster of much younger volcanoes.
About eleven hundred years ago, thick, pasty lava began pushing up out of the ground here, with explosions of steam, and built a group of steep lava domes. They sat quietly steaming for centuries. Then, about seven hundred years ago, one of the domes collapsed. Its rock broke loose in a high-speed avalanche that raced across where this highway now runs and partway up nearby Table Mountain. The rockfall dammed Manzanita Creek, and that is how Manzanita Lake was born.
That history worried people. In the nineteen seventies, two scientists became concerned that another rockfall could reach the Manzanita Lake area, and to keep visitors safe, the park closed its facilities there. In the decades that followed, more research found that while rockfalls are still possible, one is unlikely to reach the developed area.
Point 9 · At the stop
Chaos Crags and Jumbles
This is the Chaos Crags viewpoint. The stark, jagged domes are Chaos Crags, lava domes like Lassen Peak and some of the youngest volcanoes in this part of the park. When Lassen Peak first formed, it probably looked a lot like these do now, with steep sides covered in broken rock.
The rough ground of broken rock is the Chaos Jumbles, left by that collapse. A dwarf forest has grown over the waves of rock. The trees are small, but they're slowly reclaiming it.
Scientists have watched this area since Lassen Peak's eruption. Today, the U.S. Geological Survey's California Volcano Observatory runs a network of sensors to catch any rise in earthquakes, ground movement or gas that could mean magma is on the way up. No one can say when, but the Lassen area will almost certainly erupt again.
History, on the way there
On the way: Manzanita Lake and the Loomis Museum
Next, we're heading to Manzanita Lake and the Loomis Museum, the last stop of the tour.
Benjamin Loomis arrived in northern California as a young child. At eighteen he moved to the Manzanita Lake area, built a cabin on the creek above the lake and made his living cutting shakes. Later he ran a store, a hotel, a freighting business and a lumber mill in the nearby town of Viola. He married Estella when he was forty, and their only daughter, Louisa Mae, was born two years later. She loved the forests and mountains, and she died young, at twenty-one.
In her memory, Benjamin and Estella built a museum here in 1927 to keep his eruption photographs safe. He wrote that many good photographs of the volcano would otherwise be lost within a decade. Two years later, they gave the museum, the land around it and a seismograph building to the park.
Point 10 · At the stop
Manzanita Lake and the Loomis Museum
This is the Loomis Museum, at Manzanita Lake. Benjamin Loomis built it of native stone and reinforced concrete, with twenty skylights set into its dome-shaped roof. Near the front stands the small seismograph building he made from different kinds of volcanic rock. Visitors once watched a needle inside trace the Earth's slightest movements onto a slowly turning spool of paper. Across the plaza is the house where Benjamin and Estella spent their summers, selling photographs, film and postcards.
When they gave all this to the park in 1929, few national parks had museums at all, and none had been built and donated by private citizens.
Starting in 1952, Selena LaMarr, a member of the Atsugewi tribe and the park's first woman naturalist, demonstrated her people's traditional ways for visitors right outside this museum.
Manzanita Lake is a short walk away, and Reflection Lake is close by. Reflection Lake was named for the way Lassen Peak and Chaos Crags are mirrored in its water on a still day.
That's the end of the tour. From steam rising out of a lost volcano to a lake made by a falling mountain, everything you've seen today was shaped by fire, ice and water, and it's still being shaped. Thanks for spending the day with me in Lassen.